Objectives

A lot has already been done on power efficiency but much more is needed to address the very important challenge related to energy. Important breakthroughs can be achieved only if the whole energy chain of a system is addressed. To that respect BENEFIC will continue to work on energy saving but also on energy production and distribution. The main objective of the project will be in providing a holistic approach integrating new sources of energy harvesting, innovative approaches of distributing energy closer to places where it is used. The new methods developed in this project will allow a better prediction and management strategies of power consumption at the architecture definition level.

Nowadays, a new category of “nomad smart devices” are invading our daily life, that are always connected and requiring more cores that work at higher frequencies and below a tight power consumption budget. In spite of a lot of efforts in silicon technologies and battery capacity, it is not sufficient to compensate or better to overtake the greediness of the new features of such devices in energy. Decreasing CMOS feature size will not be enough to reach future 3GPP bit rate and following this trend a power gap that is estimated at > 13x by 2020 must to be closed.
In the same way and depending on form factor of our “nomad smart devices”, the acceptable power dissipation is limited by the thermal aspects in order to insure the comfort of the end-user. A simplistic analysis gives a maximum sustainable power dissipation of 4W for a smart-phone until near 15W for a >7’’ display devices.
BENEFIC is organized around five applications domains which are Professional Communication, Telecom, Health Care, Space, and Advanced Energy Efficiency. These application domains fit the various markets addressed by the partners, and will be supported by specific demonstrators in each application domains illustrating the impact of BENEFIC on energy efficiency.